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Deborah James
David Webster: an activist anthropologist
twenty years on
Article (Accepted version)
(Refereed)
Original citation:
James, Deborah (2009) David Webster: an activist anthropologist twenty years on. African studies,
68 (2). pp. 287-297.
DOI: 10.1080/00020180903109672
© 2009 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd on behalf of the University of Witwatersrand
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David Webster: an activist anthropologist twenty years on
Deborah James
African Studies 68(2) 2009
On 1 May 1989, anthropologist David Webster was assassinated outside his home in
Troyeville, Johannesburg, South Africa by a marksman acting on behalf of the apartheid
state. His assassination, carried out without apparent specific motive but certainly linked
to his activities as a human rights advocate, was condemned in the strongest terms, and
his loss widely mourned. Over ten thousand mourners processed through Johannesburg’s
streets at his funeral (Spiegel and Kadalie 1989). The obituaries published in a variety of
academic journals (Hammond-Tooke 1989; Spiegel and Kadalie 1989; E Webster 1989;
Klugman 1989) were however relatively low-key and subdued compared to the
outpourings of grief, outrage and anger which his death occasioned in the wider world. It
was beyond the university community, and in particular in the arena of anti-apartheid
activism, that Webster appeared to have made his most significant mark.
Twenty years on it is worth reassessing the balance between the political and the
anthropological work of this intriguing and somewhat contradictory figure. To do so now
is apposite not only because of the anniversary of his untimely death, but also because a
volume based on his PhD thesis is to be published this year, translated into Portuguese, in
a volume edited by Joao de Pina Cabral (Webster 2009). But the fact that it has taken 32
years to bring the document to the attention of the wider world and especially to the
Lusophone community, and that it is has taken two decades since his death to publish any
book by him at all, points to a number of anomalies. Contradictions in South Africa’s
turbulent passage to democracy, in the relationship between South Africa and its
neighbours in the region – especially the one situated just to the north-east, Mozambique
- and in the changing character of anthropological scholarship in that country, have all
conspired to stall the publication of this book. There have also been contradictory
tendencies in the life and work of its author, and personal tensions experienced by a man
torn between dedication to the profession of anthropologist and commitment to a struggle
against a brutal and unlawful regime. It is perhaps true to say that these tensions were
never fully resolved. Had they been, and had David Webster survived, he might
eventually have achieved the standing of a public intellectual in the fullest sense of the
word. But the efforts he made are no less praiseworthy for all that.
If, by the time of David’s assassination in 1989, he was better known for his political
activism, and for his written interventions which were offered as testimony against the
inequities produced by the apartheid system (1981b, 1982b, 1983a and b, 1984a, 1989)
than for his academic writings, this was not because the latter were insubstantial. And
they too encompass a startling range, from anthropological articles on Chopi and Tembe
Thonga kinship terminology, marriage strategy and domestic life on the one hand (1973,
1977, 1981a, 1986a, 1991) to writings on proletarianisation, capital and class (1976,
1978, 1983a); nutrition and disease (1986c) and the unemployment crisis in Soweto
(1982a, 1983b, 1984b) on the other. This surprising juxtaposition is explained in part by a
sudden switch in anthropology’s theoretical trajectory: a switch experienced with
particular force by left-leaning and radical academics in South Africa. It is also explained
by David’s own personal trajectory which took him step-by-step into political activism.
But it did not do so along a predetermined path.
The backdrop of David's childhood, adolescence, student days and research field
‘spanned four different countries in southern Africa in different phases of
decolonialisation’ (Glenda Webster, personal communication). It is likely that all of
these contributed in some way to making him an anthropologist with a commitment to
political activism in South Africa. But they did not do so in any preordained manner.
Some accounts, written in somewhat heroic vein to celebrate his role in fighting ‘for our
freedom’ (Frederikse 1998) or to commemorate him as a ‘campaigner for human rights’
(Klugman 1989; see also E Webster 1989), interpret David’s early life through the prism
of his later activism. They represent his family as members of the white working class,
who left Roodepoort in South Africa to settle in Luanshya, in what was then Northern
Rhodesia. David, born in 1945, is depicted as having inherited racist attitudes from his
background and from his schooling at Falcon College boarding school in then Southern
Rhodesia, but as then having overcome these in the course of his undergraduate
university education – first in accountancy, later in anthropology – completed in 1967 at
Rhodes University. He is then shown as further transcending these attitudes, eventually to
become the militant campaigner celebrated in all his obituaries. But matters were
considerably more nuanced than this suggests.
If David did indeed learn something of his activist humanism in the course of his studies
as an anthropologist, it is probable that his initial experience of fieldwork among the
Chopi of the Inharrime district of southern Mozambique, in 1969, played no small part in
this process. His then wife Glenda Webster, who accompanied him, recalls being
received as a clan member (she was a Mucumbi and David was a Nyakwaha), and being
continually plied with produce: maize cobs grilled over small fires, peanuts or cashew
nuts, chickens, venison and tea made with condensed milk (a highly valued commodity
only used on very special occasions). She recalls one occasion when the Websters were
passing the home of someone who was in his hut shaving. ‘When he heard the car he
came rushing out with shaving cream all over his face to wave at us.’ The hospitality and
generosity they experienced, says Glenda, justifies ‘Vasco da Gama’s description of this
part of the east coast of Africa as ‘terra de boa gente’ - the land of the good people’
(Glenda Webster, personal communication).
Schooled in structural-functionalist anthropology, David Webster found this descentoriented approach inadequate to explain the variable and flexible character of Chopi
society. He began instead to deploy frameworks of analysis derived from the scholars of
the Manchester school, with their emphasis on transaction and strategy. But shortly after
graduating with the PhD in 1975, and having started his first permanent lecturing job at
the University of the Witwatersrand, he was soon exposed to a far more radical
alternative. Ironically, his first actual acquaintance with Manchester, when he and Glenda
traveled to the UK and he taught in the Department of Anthropology there for two
consecutive periods between 1976 and 1978, instead of increasing his interest in
transactionalist analysis, began to distance him from the theories and techniques of
anthropology. Instead he was influenced by sociologists deploying Marxist theories, such
as Peter Worsley, and by the work of social historians such as E P Thompson. Whether
this moment represented, for him, a permanent transgressing of the boundaries of
mainstream anthropology, or a short-term preoccupation with new modes of analysis
which could be successfully reunited with fieldwork and participant observation, is a
matter for debate.
Profoundly influenced by an academic climate in which the experiences of the working
class and the impact of capitalism and industrialization were predominant, he returned to
South Africa and to his lecturing job at the University of the Witwatersrand. His teaching,
using key works in the Marxist canon including some which were banned in South Africa
at the time, informed - and reflected – increasingly radical South African trends, and his
publications on the Chopi began to reflect similar concerns, expressing his growing
interest in their proletarianisation and incorporation into the ranks of the migrant labour
force working in South Africa’s gold mines (1976, 1978).
David’s interests gradually switched away from the ‘satellites’ of migrant labour and
towards its South African ‘metropolis’, in particular the Witwatersrand, at whose
university he continued to teach. He began to produce a range of short, arguably more
journalistic pieces primarily intended to demonstrate the inadequacies of the South
African apartheid system (1982b, 1983a and b), its health care (1983a) and nutrition
(1981b). But he remained interested in Mozambique, where many ANC and SACP
members, some in exile from South Africa, were living at the time. Both his connections
in Mozambique and the radical nature of the transformation he underwent while living in
the UK have fuelled speculation that David might at some point have been recruited to
the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe or the ANC-allied South African Communist
Party (SACP), or both. It was at around the time of his return to South Africa that SACP
member Ruth First, wife of Umkhonto we Sizwe commander Joe Slovo, wrote to him,
expressing interest in his piece on colonialism, underdevelopment and migrant labour in
Mozambique (1976), and requesting some help with sources for her own book on a
similar topic, later published as Black Gold (1983). In her letter, she refers to an enquiry
he had made to her about the possibility of working at or liaising with Eduardo Mondlane
University, in Maputo: one which he did not eventually pursue. 1 A matter which
similarly points to his possible membership of Umkhonto was his later involvement in
helping party member Hélène Pastoors and her partner Klaas de Jonge, who fell foul of
the South African authorities. Pastoors, who had come to South Africa from Mozambique
where she was living as a member of Umkhonto, was briefly employed as a fellow
lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand (Frederikse 1998). When she was later
detained David Webster offered help and support.
Whatever his formal party or institutional connections, which are a matter of speculation,
the character of his involvement as an activist within the country, and the extent to which
his activities became irksome to the South African authorities, are a matter of public
record. It has never been fully established which of these activities led to the terrible
event of his assassination. But all of these activities appear to have caused extreme
displeasure: whether to criminal smuggling networks, the police, the border authorities,
nature conservation officials, or more shadowy figures higher up the authority chain. His
death has been blamed on his co-founding of and active involvement in an organization
called the Detainees’ Parents’ Support Committee (DPSC), which provided advice and
nurture to relatives of those detained without trial during the increasingly repressive years
of the 1980s, and sent gifts to the detainees themselves. Police, apparently aggrieved at
the organisation’s success in helping to boost the morale of those they were most keen to
discourage, continually disrupted the regular ‘tea parties’ held by David and his
colleagues in the Committee, including Maggie Friedman, his then partner. 2 His murder
has also been explained by reference to his having uncovered illegal smuggling routes for
arms or ivory between Natal and Mozambique while doing fieldwork in the late 1980s
(Frederikse 1998). Probably less significant in contributing to his death, but still showing
his tenacity and engagement, was David’s opposition during the same period to the nature
conservation officials of northern Natal, whom he suspected of hatching a plot to create a
giant nature reserve and - in the process – of resettling numerous villagers from their
1
Letter to David Webster from Ruth First, 8 May 1977, box A6, A2792, Historical Papers Library,
University of the Witwatersrand.
2
Mail and Guardian, 12-18th May 1989
homes in the area. 3 Whatever the source of official or less official displeasure, the true
reasons for David’s assassination by Ferdi Barnard, member of the clandestine and
shadowy Civil Co-operation Bureau with tenuous links to official police structures, were
never fully revealed. Requests by the members of the David Webster Trust that his death
‘should not be viewed as a free-standing case of an individual murder but rather as part of
a co-ordinated campaign’, 4 an eventual inquest in 1992, and sessions of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission which were held in 1996 after the advent of democracy in
1994, never revealed a chain of command. Barnard was eventually charged with murder
and sentenced in 1997, but without implicating any holders of higher office in the
apartheid government of the time.
But although David’s political activism appears to have overshadowed his academic
activities after the late 1970s, and although his death brought both to an untimely close,
there was a revival of his interest in academic fieldwork. Activism did not eclipse
anthropology altogether. Tracing his work through the two major research projects
conducted in this later period, one can discern a gradual progression. Starting from an
initial theoretical awkwardness, the work demonstrates a growing intellectual maturity: it
contains the promise that his activist concerns might eventually have dovetailed with
research interests to produce a new synthesis.
It was not, however, an easy road. The first project, a jointly-run study on the informal
sector and unemployment in Soweto, made an attempt to reconceptualise ‘informal
sector’ activities as ‘petty commodity production’ (1982a, 1983b, 1984b, 1986b) which
was rejected by some as having sacrificed ethnographic detail and empirical richness to
an arid and abstract debate. The work combined some of the influences he had picked up
in Manchester with a tendency to pick over neo-Marxist categories that had become
prevalent in South Africa by that time. In retrospect, these episodes of criticism, and the
defensive responses they prompted, can be seen as having manifested the kind of
3
Ellis (1994); see also letter from David Webster, 8th July (probably 1980), to Dan, Pippa, Pam and Ross;
box A6, A2792, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand.
4
David Webster Trust, Memorandum, box A6, A2792, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library,
University of the Witwatersrand.
factional in-fighting that has often caused left-wing scholars and activists to find more
fault with each other than they do with those to whom they are opposed.
The second of these projects, returning David to his earlier vocation as hands-on
ethnographic fieldworker in a rural setting, was more fruitful. From 1976, and with
redoubled vigour after 1986, he spent time amongst the Tembe Thonga of northern
Zululand: a group whose territory and culture officially borders southern Mozambique
but in fact crosses that border. Here he continued his interest in migrant labour,
combining this with a focus on ethnicity, gender and household. In his articles from this
period, particularly the one published posthumously in a tribute to Townsmen or
Tribesmen author Philip Mayer, his former lecturer and mentor at Rhodes University, he
successfully brings together subtle ethnographic analysis with theoretical perspectives
from contemporary social science (1991). He sensitively deploys the concept of
‘subculture’, borrowed from Dick Hebdidge of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural
Studies, to explain why Tembe Thonga women speak and dress as ‘Thonga’ while their
husbands and brothers self-identify as ‘Zulu’. By focusing on women’s self-definition
within the household, he offers an insightful challenge to what was becoming a
hegemonic view among revisionist scholars: that ethnicity represents ‘a form of popular
male resistance to the forces that were reshaping African lives throughout southern Africa’
(Vail 1989:15). Here, matters of anthropological interest such as marriage, gender and the
domestic domain re-appear in his work, explained but not wholly determined by the
broader context of proletarian experience and labour migration (as Marxist scholars
would have thought appropriate), but allowing some agency to individual actors (as the
Manchester school might have proposed).
Might David have proceeded further along these lines to contribute further to the revival
of anthropology in South Africa and/or Mozambique? Or might he have taken up a key
position in ANC structures and/or in the new government of South Africa, as did some
other activist/academics? If so, might he have become disillusioned by - or even been
sidelined as a result of - the post-1999/post-Mandela regime’s gradual erosion of the
ANC’s non-racial tradition? Perhaps, in turn, he would have come back to anthropology
once again, upholding traditions of criticism and debate, airing the grievances of common
people, and becoming a public intellectual in the true sense of the word. These are
questions about which his former friends, colleagues and students (I count myself as a
member of all three) often speculate. But all of these people, and many more besides, will
be heartened and delighted that this account of his original Chopi fieldwork is finally to
be published, and that an aspect of his work long overlooked will now become better
known. It seems particularly apposite that the work’s publication in Portuguese will
contribute to the current strengthening and transnational interconnectedness of
anthropology in the Lusophone world.
Deborah James
Dept of Anthropology, London School of Economics
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